Why YOUR Company Must Become a Tech Company - Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram Lessons

Adam Hartung
, ContributorBusiness Success today requires identifying and dealing with market shifts. It is insufficient to be operationally excellent, you have to be agile to deal with changing marketsOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Portrait of Henry Ford (ca. 1919) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Apple's amazing increase in value is more than just a "rah-rah" story for a turnaround. Fundamentally, Apple is telling everyone - globally - that there has been a tectonic shift in markets. And if leaders don't understand this shift, and incorporate it into their strategy and tactics, their organizations are going to have a very difficult future.

Recently Apple's value peaked at $600B. Yes, that is an astounding number, for it reflects not only 50% greater value than the oil giant Exxon/Mobil (~$390B), but more than the entire value of the stock markets in Spain, Greece and Portugal combined!

This astounding valuation causes many investors to be reticent about owning Apple shares, for it seems implausible that any one company - especially a tech company with so few employees - could be worth so much.

Unless we look at this information in the context of a major, global economic shift. Consider that what the world values has changed dramatically. And that what investors are telling business (and government) leaders is that in a globalized, fast paced world value is based upon what you know, when you know it - in other words information. Not land, buildings or the ability to make things.

We've moved from an agrarian through the industrial to the new information economy

Three hundred years ago the world's wealthiest people owned land. For centuries wars were fought to control land. Kings owned land, and by controlling it captured the value of everything produced on that land. As governments developed, reducing the role of kings, land barons became the wealthiest people in the world. In an agrarian economy, where most human resources (and pretty much all others for that matter) were deployed in food and shelter production owning land was the most valuable thing on the planet.

But then some 120 years ago along came the industrial revolution. Suddenly, productivity rose dramatically by applying new machines to jobs formerly performed by humans. With this shift, value changed. The great industrialists were able to capture the value of greater productivity - making people like Cyrus McCormick, Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie the wealthiest of the wealthy. Worth more than kings, government leaders, most states and many foreign countries.

The age of manufacturing was based upon the productivity of machines and the application of industrial processes to what formerly was hand labor. Creating tools - from engines to automobiles to airplanes - created great wealth. Knowing how to make these machines, and making them, created enormous value. And companies like General Motors, General Dynamics and General Electric were worth much more than the land upon which food was produced.